The metric of the future should be happiness, with
investors asking a company about their employee happiness levels,
says Nic Marks, founder of the Centre for Wellbeing and creator of
the Happy Planet
Index.

"In 1992 I had this crazy idea that GDP was the wrong
measure of progress; having a measure of how much money a nation
makes can't be the best way of measuring progress," Marks told the
audience at the Happy
Startup School's Summer Camp in Hyde Park. Marks is convinced
that we can measure progress better by creating a measure of "our
lived experience", and at the Summer Camp -- largely attended by
young startups or those considering launching a new business --
Marks was on a mission to convince the audience of the same. "I
want to convince you it's absolutely vital. It's not just about
this plastic happiness. Real happiness is a vital part of our
humanity and it's important."

Negative emotions, he noted, have been understood
from an evolutionary stand point for some time. Fear, for instance
is of course integral to the flight or fight response, and
survival. The point of happiness, on the other hand is a relatively
young topic of investigation and has, up until recently, been
perceived as merely being useful as a signal of good function: "I'm
happy, carry on" etc. Drawing on studies of the past few decades,
Marks insisted it was empirically proven that happiness makes for
more creative and productive employees.

Barbara Fredrickson, professor of psychology at the
University of North Carolina, for example, has famously gathered
evidence for a happiness "tipping point" at which the emotion
begins to drive creativity and productivity.

"She would do things like show half a roomful of
people a video of cats playing, and the other half footage of cats
been killed. She manipulates moods and then judges how volunteers
perform tasks differently. [She found that] positive emotions
broaden our repertoire of responses and reactions, and help us do
more things and be more creative."

"If you're happy, you smile, which is an approach
signal so you build better relationships. If you're unhappy and
scowling people will stay away from you. Over time this builds our
resources, we expand over time. In a business context, if you catch
people doing things right, tell them. Build on it. Positives are
about opportunities and negatives are about threats."

It makes sense that reactionary good work carried out
due to fear of failure or punishment is far less creative than work
done in a supportive environment. According to Fredrickson, who
carried out an empirical study (published in 2005) which involved
monitoring the meetings held by 60 different teams, the magic
number was three -- three positive comments to every one negative
is the tipping point at which you get the most out of people.
Anything more than eight, and things get a bit weird. "You need
some grit in the system," says Marks. "Negative emotions are
functional. When one of Nasa's spacecraft's crashed, they said too
many people were agreeing with each other. Challenge is good. But
continually being negative is stifling."

Although it might be of comfort to have empirical
evidence that positivity pays off, the theory has recently been
trashed in a paper published in American
Psychologist, which states that there is "no theoretical or empirical justification for the use
of differential equations drawn from fluid dynamics, a subfield of
physics, to describe changes in human emotions over time", that
there are "fundamental conceptual and mathematical errors"
in Fredrickson's study, and that the concluding positivity
ratio is "entirely unfounded".

Marks did point to other studies that back up the
theory, however. Jim Harter, chief scientist for Gallup's workplace management practice, for instance, has
carried out studies that have concluded the impact of happiness at
work on performance is twice as large as from performance on
happiness at work. And for anyone convinced that a focus on
employee happiness should always come second to a focus on
profitability, Marks' point could not be better stipulated that
with this fact, produced by a 2012
study: "Companies listed in the '100 Best
Companies to Work For in America' generated 2.3 to 3.8 percent per
year higher stock returns than their peers from
1984-2011."

Unsurprisingly, it's figures like
that which convince people. Marks is hoping to build on that with
his startup Happiness Works, which creates surveys specifically to
measure employee happiness at work. "Numbers make it seem
real," says Marks. "But it's the conversations that make change,
not the numbers. Our surveys are like a mirror, you see what is,
but also like a window, you see through to what could be."